Writing
Notes on leadership, culture and resilience. What actually happens between people at work, and what to do about it on Monday.
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Teams ·
You keep answering before your team has finished thinking
You have the answer in seconds and you give it. Your team has learned to wait for it, and they have stopped bringing their own.
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Authority ·
Your boss keeps going around you to your team
Your manager hands your people work directly and asks them for updates. Your team no longer knows which of you to answer.
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Priorities ·
Your team can no longer tell which of your priorities is real
You keep adding urgent work and rarely say what stops. Your team has started choosing for you, and quietly.
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Recognition ·
Your praise has stopped meaning anything to your team
You say great job often and you mean it every time. Somewhere along the way, your team stopped hearing it as information.
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Decisions ·
You made the call, and now you keep reopening it
You decided weeks ago and you are still turning it over. Your team can tell, and they have stopped committing to it.
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Fairness ·
Your team worked out who your favourite is
A name arrives first in your head when good work comes in, and your team knew whose it was before you did.
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Development ·
Someone wants to move off your team and you could stop it
A good person asks to move to another team, and nobody will ever know if you quietly slow it down.
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Standing ·
Your new boss does not know what you have already fixed
A new manager arrives above you, and most of what you had agreed with the last one was never written down.
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Retention ·
The resignation you saw coming in June
A good person hands in their notice and none of it surprises you, which is the part worth sitting with.
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Upward ·
You have been absorbing your boss so your team does not have to
You rewrite every message from above before it reaches your team, and the work of doing that is invisible to everyone.
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Attention ·
Your one-to-ones have turned into status updates
The meeting runs smoothly, finishes early and tells you almost nothing. That is the format doing it, not the person.
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Peers ·
You are now managing the people you used to sit with
You were promoted from inside the team, and the people who were your equals last month now report to you.
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Conflict ·
You have become the go-between for two people who will not talk
Two people on your team stopped dealing with each other, and everything now routes through you. Relaying it is what keeps it alive.
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Hiring ·
You are four months short and about to hire the wrong person
A vacancy that has run for months quietly changes how you interview, and the person you hire in that state rarely lasts.
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Performance ·
The person everyone works around
Someone on your team delivers, and colleagues quietly arrange their work to avoid them. You have been paying for that.
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Careers ·
Telling someone they did not get the promotion
You chose someone else, and now you have to sit opposite the person who wanted it. What you say decides what they do next.
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Discretion ·
You know something about their jobs that you cannot tell them
You are in the room where it is being discussed, and your team is asking you directly. Silence is not lying.
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Credibility ·
You have lost the room and the meeting has forty minutes left
The room went cold and nobody said why. Getting it back starts with a smaller conversation than the one you are planning.
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Wellbeing ·
Your strongest person is the last one you will check on
The person who never misses is the easiest to overlook, and the first signs that they are running empty show up in the work.
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Standards ·
Nobody is afraid of your standard
A high bar is not what makes people careful around you. Not knowing which version of you they will get is.
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Transitions ·
The team you inherited has been fixed before
You were handed a team that is not working, and your first three ideas have probably already been tried here and dropped.
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Pushback ·
You agreed to something you cannot deliver
You said yes to a date you knew was wrong. The way out is pricing the work rather than refusing it.
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Accountability ·
Owning a mistake without handing over the room
You got a call wrong and your team already knows. Saying so plainly builds standing, provided you stop at the right point.
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Feedback ·
The feedback conversation that went well and changed nothing
You were clear, they agreed, and six weeks later nothing has moved. The problem is usually not your delivery.
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Boundaries ·
Always being available is a decision you never made
You reply within minutes, at any hour, and call it service. Your team is learning something from it that you did not intend to teach.
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Authority ·
Managing someone who knows more than you do
Someone on your team has been doing this far longer than you have, and is better at it. Your authority does not come from closing that gap.
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Promotion ·
Promoting your best person is not automatically a reward
Your strongest individual contributor is the obvious candidate for the manager job, and that is exactly why the promotion so often goes wrong.
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Integrity ·
Carrying a decision you argued against
You lost the argument upstairs, and now you have to deliver the outcome to your team. How you do that is watched closely.
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Teams ·
Your team is having a second meeting without you
If the honest conversation only starts once you have left the room, the problem is not disloyalty. It is the room.
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Trust ·
Why you keep taking the work back
Delegation rarely stalls because you are short of time. It stalls because handing work over means letting someone else risk your name.
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Resilience ·
Optimism is not the same as pretending
Forced positivity asks people to lie about how bad it is. Real optimism starts by admitting it, then looks for what can still be done.
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Influence ·
You can be right, or you can be listened to
Being correct is not the same as being persuasive. The gap between them is where a lot of good ideas quietly die.
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Culture ·
What you walk past is what you've agreed to
Culture is not built in the offsite. It is built in the small moments a leader decides to say nothing.
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